Always the planner for every possible outcome, I decided to take the afternoon off work following a doctor?s appointment with my husband to find out our fertility test results.
?Yeah,? my friend told me, ?that?s a good idea. It might be a really heavy appointment.?
It struck me as a weird thing to say. Of course it wasn?t going to be a heavy appointment?everything would be fine. I wasn?t the kind of person who goes to a doctor?s appointment and gets bad news. I didn?t know who that kind of person was, but I knew it wasn?t me.
Our doctor delivered the news in a matter-of-fact tone, but her expression betrayed the seriousness of what she was saying. Our case was rare: She told us that my husband has a condition called azoospermia, which means that his semen contains very small amounts of sperm, and I have a blocked fallopian tube. Not only was it worse than we thought, it was a Very Bad Case of Infertility. It ended up taking four years of trying (including our own attempts, a pregnancy loss, hormone treatments for both of us, surgery for my husband, three intrauterine insemination cycles and two rounds of in vitro fertilization?one with my husband?s sperm and one with donor sperm) for us to finally get pregnant.
The first thing to change was my unwavering confidence that everything would be OK. In retrospect, my plans, which were to get married and get pregnant immediately, seem silly. As a type A, I?d even factored in a contingency year for ?trouble,? but the plan was to ge...